


Tarvek and Violetta Save the Library

by phoenixyfriend



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: By debating on the ethics of murdering his cousin for being inconvenient and kind of a douchebag, Cats, Gen, Internal Monologue, Pre-Canon, Sparkhounds, Tarvek manages to Chidi himself, The Incorruptible Library
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 15:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17287076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend
Summary: Martellus brings a Sparkhound to the Library. It sees one of the giant cats and gives chase. It's up to Violetta and Tarvek to handle this!Unfortunately.





	Tarvek and Violetta Save the Library

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gisho](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/gifts).



> I tried to mix two of the prompts for this project: "anything set in the Incorruptible Library, especially if it involves their army of giant cats" and "Violetta and Tarvek, pre-canon or post-canon, team up to solve some problem, or any level of seriousness." I didn't quite manage to fit in the worldbuilding and the bulk of the snark is internal and about Martellus, but... hoping this fits!

Violetta bursts into the room, and the gust of wind that the swinging door causes nearly topples Tarvek’s pile of papers. It’s a precarious pile, so it’s kind of his own fault, but he still casts her a glare as he slams a hand down on top of them just before the one on top flies off.

“Do you _mind?”_ He snaps.

“We have a problem,” Violetta says, stepping past the table, pivoting on the spot, and slamming her hands down on the wood.

“I’m _working on something_.”

“I _don’t care_ ,” Violetta responds. “Do you still want to read those treatises on neurodivergence in clank development and how it relates to the strength of the spark who created it?”

Tarvek blinks at her. “I thought they weren’t done with the preservation—”

“And they aren’t going to be!” Violetta yells, throwing her hands up in the air. For someone who’s only seventeen and barely scraping five feet tall, she has a pretty big presence when she wants to. “Tweedle went to borrow a book and brought one of his Sparkhounds!”

Tarvek feels the blood drain from his face. “Don’t tell me tha—”

“It saw one of the cats,” Violetta says flatly. “What do you _think_ happened?”

Tarvek races for the door, barely remembering to grab his coat on the way. Violetta pulls the door shut as she follows him.

The wind from the closing door topples Tarvek’s precarious pile of Prehistoric Pyrokinetics papers.

Oh well.

o.o.o.o.o

Tarvek slides into the library, jumps a bannister, and lands in the middle of a gaggle of student librarians. Half the senior librarians are off on a raid, and it shows.

The other half are rallying as many student librarians as they can.

“Where is he?” Tarvek demands, standing straight. “Where’s Martellus?”

“I think he’s arguing with Professor Hardison,” one of the student librarians offers.

“Of course he is,” Tarvek mutters, dragging a hand down his face. “And the sparkhound? The cat?”

“We can’t find them,” one of the older librarians admits. “The library’s big, and the sounds keep echoing. We tried following the trail of destruction, but they’re too fast.”

“And we think some of the other cats got involved,” a student librarian adds.

Tarvek looks at Violetta. Violetta looks back.

Neither of them are happy about this, but they’re going to do it anyway.

“We’ll get the dog.”

o.o.o.o.o

Tarvek is pretty sure he’s going to kill Tweedle when this is all over.

“LEFT! _LEFT!”_ Violetta screams, and Tarvek dives sideways as the sparkhound barrels through the spot he’d been standing in seconds before.

He’s still holding back, not really showing how much he’d paid attention to the Smoke Knight lessons, but it’s hard. The sparkhounds are _fast_ , and Tarvek’s hard-pressed to play weakling while actually remaining uninjured.

Violetta curses and jumps from the top of a bookcase to land on the sparkhound’s back. She subsequently starts screaming at a pitch that is generally reserved for small children. It’s not that she’s scared, because Tarvek’s rarely seen Violetta scared of anything short of actual family members and the Master of Paris, mostly because everyone with an ounce of sense is scared of _them_. It’s just that she’s very angry, and she’s still young enough for everything she says to be very, _very_ high.

She’s on the cusp of adulthood, so her voice will _probably_ reach a more mature pitch soon, as she keeps pointing out whenever someone mocks her for it. The mocking usually comes from Tweedle, so that’s probably the only reason Violetta hasn’t gone for violence as a solution to the problem.

Tarvek takes the opportunity that Violetta’s provided to dig through the poisons stocked at his waist. Tweedle would go _ballistic_ if one of the dogs died, and then Grandma would be annoyed, and Seffie would whine and let loose some crocodile tears, and Tarvek would be in trouble. The sparkhound is also not really deserving of death, if only because it’s doing what it was bred to do, kind of, and it’s all Tweedle’s fault.

So really, Tarvek should be killing Tweedle, except that would make Seffie and Grandma even _more_ annoyed and maybe actually sad, and Tarvek doesn’t actually _hate_ Tweedle the way he hates his dad and, say, Leopold, so it’s not like Tweedle really deserves to die either.

Part of Tarvek wants to kill him anyway, but Tarvek quashes it, because that’s the part that his parents nurtured, and anything his parents nurtured was either self-defense or evil.

Tarvek doesn’t actually want to be evil, and Tweedle’s annoying but not actually on the “let’s all kill Tarvek” train yet, so it’s not self-defense either.

Trying to be a worthy heir to the throne means ethics, and ethics are a pain in the ass that Tarvek really, really hopes are worth it.

Ethics makes him feel less like a tool, at least, so—

“ARE YOU GOING TO DO SOMETHING OR NOT?!” Violetta screams at him.

That’s fair.

Tarvek fumbles through a handful of poisons, a few antidotes, and a couple vials of random chemicals that could really go either way. He figures out just what to put together to knock out the giant dog without injuring it, and more or less manages to ignore Violetta’s angry yelling and the quickly-nearing sound of enraged giant cats.

“Move!”

Violetta hops up and out of range just as Tarvek throws the jury-rigged mixture right into the sparkhound’s face.

It whines, clawing at its nose, and says a few choice words about Tarvek’s parentage before it goes down. Tarvek pockets those memories, because the framing of these particular insults was something that technically applied to Tweedle too, and this way Tarvek can make jabs at his cousin about how even the sparkhounds think the family tree is more of a bonsai.

(Tarvek had only seen a bonsai for the first time two years ago at the Nihon embassy in Vienna, and had engaged in a delightful little conversation with a local gardener on how they were cared for. He found it a suitably apt metaphor for his own family, and hoped he’d have a chance to bring it up soon to someone who would not only understand it, but wouldn’t kill him for it, or _tell_ someone who’d kill him for it. There was a lot of worrying about someone killing Tarvek for pointing out the concerning intermarriages and rampant fulminicide.[1])

(Ironic, considering said rampant fulminicide was part of why the bonsai tree metaphor worked in the first place.)

(Tarvek’s _pretty_ sure Tweedle isn’t on the murder train regarding him yet.)

“That only took for _ever_ ,” Violetta snarks, dropping to the ground from the chandelier she’d somehow ended up hanging from. “What got you distracted?”

“I’m trying to decide if Tweedle actually deserves to die,” Tarvek tells her. “I’m leaning towards ‘probably not.’”

Violetta wrinkles her nose and punches him in the shoulder. Tarvek cringes in not-entirely-faked pain. She ignores this. “Keep that for _after_ we take care of the rampaging sparkhound, dummy!”

“I was trying to decide if I should kill the dog, too!”

Violetta doesn’t have time to answer this, because that’s when the cats come back.

There are a lot more than earlier.

Tarvek’s gearing up for another game of running around and avoiding claws and teeth and similarly sharp things, and he’s more or less ready, _really_ , except Violetta pulls something out of her pocket, throws it into the middle of the herd of angry, angry, _giant_ cats, and they… stop.

Tarvek gapes.

“What did you _do?”_

“High-speed catnip bomb,” Violetta says. She smirks at him, a ‘haha, I was smarter than the Spark!’ look that she’s perfected over the years. “I always bring one to the library.”

“High-speed in that it explodes fast or high-speed in that it’s fast-acting?” Tarvek asks.

Violetta gestures at the giant cats, annoyance clear on her face. “What do you _think?”_

Tarvek looks at the giant cats, which are making loud noises, rolling around in the scattered leaves, and in one case, ineffectually trying to bat at each other and completely missing.

“Both?”

“Both,” Violetta confirms. She plants her hands on her hips, turns, and frowns down at the unconscious sparkhound. “So… what do we do with _this_ thing?”

“The chemicals won’t last forever, and…” Tarvek looks at the giant cats. “The catnip won’t, either.”

So the sparkhound might wake up, _or_ it might get mauled by the giant cats once the nip wears off.

Tarvek looks at Violetta. Violetta looks back.

“I hate you so much,” Violetta grumbles, rolling up her sleeves.

 _“You’re_ the one who dragged me into this,” Tarvek snipes back, doing the same.

They each grab a giant paw and start pulling.

Tarvek is going to _kill_ Tweedle.

o.o.o.o.o

Tarvek doesn’t kill Tweedle, but he _does_ spike his cousin’s tea with laxatives the next day.

He deserves a little petty revenge.

 

[1] Fulminicide: derived from _fulmen, fulminis_ (n), Latin for “lighting” and the -cide, -cida, a common root for various forms of murder. Given the Valois descendants’ general propensity for murdering various undefined or unspecified relatives, and their other common trait of being descended from the Storm King, the term was coined as a way to describe a single unspecified murder of a family member or relative, as none existed prior.


End file.
